It is especially in the nature of women, as a concomitant of their maternal functions, to yield benefits not in proportion to deserts but in proportion to the absence of deserts — to give most where capacity is least. The love of the helpless, which may serve as a general description of the parental instinct, stronger in women than in men, and swaying their conduct outside the family as well as inside more than it sways the conduct of men, must in a still greater degree than in men prompt public actions that are unduly regardful of the inferior as compared with the superior. The present tendency of both sexes is to contemplate citizens as having claims in proportion to their needs — their needs being habitually proportionate to their demerits; and this tendency, stronger in women than in men, must, if it operates politically, cause a more general fostering of the worse at the expense of the better. Instead of that maintenance of rights which, as we have seen, is but a systematic enforcement of the principle that each shall receive the good and evil results of his own conduct, there would come greater and more numerous breaches of them than at present. Still more than now would the good which the superior have earned be forcibly taken away from them to help the inferior; and still more than now would evils which the inferior have brought upon themselves be shouldered on to the superior....
The only justification for the analogy between parent and child, and government and people, is the childishness of the people who entertain the analogy.
—The Principles Of Ethics Vol II by Herbert Spencer p196, 217
